Days and Nights in the Forest
by Patroclus76
Summary: Edward Cullen comes across Sam Winchester somewhere in the Mid-West by accident. Edward is haunted by the loss of Bella, Sam by the death of Dean. Intially Edward plans to kill Sam but he is intrigued by his sorrow.
1. Chapter 1

Days and Nights in the Forest.

By Patroclus76

A story in three parts.

Twlight and Supernatural end of Season three cross-over.

_Edward Cullen comes across Sam Winchester somewhere in the Mid-West by accident. Edward is haunted by Bella, Sam by Dean's death and stint in hell. Despite planning initially to kill him, Edward senses the enormity of Sam's loss and is intrigued by him. _

_-------------------_

Edward had been aware of Sam for some time, a week or two, perhaps even longer. He had come across his masculine, feral scent one evening in a deep verdant glade filled with silver translucent sunlight. Edward had been alone for so long that the smell of a human both alarmed and thrilled him, almost turning his head. It was a strong, exotic odour. And to come across it in such a remote location, and without any preceding signs or warnings struck him as unusual. Humans were, in the main, clumsy and loud, especially males. Puzzled, Edward had turned away from his southerly direction and wheeled back towards the high pines and aspens of the foothills to have a closer look. It was an easy decision to make. Eternity spread out like a flat, undulating plain to either side of him no matter what particular direction he took. And in a strange, disturbing way Edward had become lonely, melancholy, his grief suddenly unendurable. Finding the man would be a distraction. The idea that Edward might also kill him insinuated itself in the back of his mind almost immediately, not for food of course, not even for pleasure, but as a antidote to cloud his pain, to conceal for a while the massive hole at the centre of his being.

It was a good plan. It almost cheered him. Edward passed several cloudy, thunderous days moving swiftly and effortlessly through the trees, doubling back on himself, closing in on his potential prey. The landscape was vast and empty, an anagram of his own soul. With each day the summer was passing into the gilded, shortening light of the Fall. Edward could sense the change, the slow diminishing arch of the sun and the deepening shade. He thought of Forks, and how the darkness would be invading the ferns and stands of the forest with premonitions of snow and deep chill. He thought of Bella, for a moment, but deliberately out of focus like someone looks to one side to see a dim, distant object like a faint star or a remote galaxy. Or a ghost. He had been unable to articulate his pain. It was locked up in his cold, hard body. Edward watched the stars in their eternal, inscrutable mystery, impressed by the human's economy of travel, the way he almost left no trail of his passing, no fires, no litter; his own waste cleanly buried deep into the dark, peaty soil. Who was he? What was he doing here?

Then one warm morning, almost by accident, Edward came across the man preparing to bathe in a pool of cold, clear water. He was younger than Edward had expected, not much older than himself, tall and deeply tanned with long brown hair almost like a native American. Edward wondered if he was indeed a native of the woods, but the scent had been wrong and was still wrong. Despite himself and his chill nonchalance, the sight of the man spiked Edward's interest even further. He sat on a high cliff and watched as the youth discarded his clothes and left them on a rock, neatly folded in a pile and then waded out to swim. After floating face up and then submerging himself, the man washed with careful, almost cat like movements, and after a few indifferent splashes, clambered out to dry himself in the sun. He emerged sleek with water, a buffed, toned torso and strong elegant legs. He looked at ease in his nakedness, picking himself deftly over mud and shingles to finish cleaning himself. Edward frowned, narrowing his golden flecked eyes and snorting in cold amusement. It was altogether very odd.

The youth sat, long limbed and preoccupied, rubbing his feet with a stone, his face drawn in concentration. Edward had watched Inuit communities in the North scrape their skin in this way. The movements were slow and vaguely hypnotic. Eventually, satisfied with his ablutions, the youth stood and scanned the pool and then the surrounding trees. The man's beauty was pleasing to Edward's eye, appreciative as he was of quality. In a strange way the man reminded Edward of someone he had met long ago. The Vampire muttered to himself a soft ancient rebuke. He was growing sentimental in his old age. Or perhaps he was lonelier than he had thought. Or rather there was something about the setting, the boy near the water, his body drying in the sun, that gave Edward a sense of peace at last. That was it. Edward smiled a cold, dreamy smile and leaning forward, attuned his mind to read the man's thoughts.

To Edward's extraordinary surprise, he could sense absolutely nothing. The blankness was disconcerting, an affront to his own sense of superiority. Risking exposure, for the sun was now brilliant and intense, Edward sifted his weight and tried to concentrate his thoughts on the man again. Again nothing - a vast deep emptiness - just a name - _Dean_ - a residual identity but almost infinitely remote and buried in raw red pain like a knife. Oddly it as not the youth's name but someone else's. Shocked, Edward moved awkwardly and loosened a small trickle of shale down the cliff and in an instant, like some startled deer, the man had leapt for cover, a flash of brown skin and then nothing but the glint of water and the soft endless lamentation of the wind. Angry at himself Edward left quickly, scaling up into a high pine and watched as the man, half dressed now, emerged cautiously and headed straight for the base of the cliff, tracking the ground with skill. He paused for a long time, kneeling, touching the ground and then examined the rock carefully before returning and putting his shirt on. Appalled at his carelessness, Edward worked his way around to the pool, leaping from tree to tree in a blur of movement. Perhaps the man was dangerous? Something was not right. He would be more cautious from now on.

Edward waited until dusk before he moved in again. Night was after all his element and he felt the need to use it to his advantage. With near perfect night vision, Edward soon found the man carefully concealed along side a fallen log, covered in leaves. Only his scent gave him away. Again no fire, no sense of camp or intrusion. With great stealth Edward closed in from above, but sensing at the last minute that the fallen tree would not bear his weight, he lowered himself monkey like to the ground besides the youth, feeling his blood heat now and hearing the slow thick beating of the human's heart. Close up, he seemed very young, his face curved and chiselled, one hand under his cheek. Through the top of the shirt Edward could see a smooth curve of neck corded with veins. He could kill him this boy without even thinking about it. Although recently fed, the temptation to eat proved suddenly strong and insistent, causing Edward's face to grimace and snarl. He snatched his pale cut glass face away from the smell and closed his eyes. Was he that lost? Was he really so spiritually abandoned? To his surprise, he wondered what Bella would think? Sensing some vague threat the young man shifted and turned but did not wake up. After a while Edward leaned forward carefully and put his face close to the boy's neck. With a long icy finger, the vampire almost touched the base of the throat; the heat was astounding: human heat never ceased to amaze Edward: 37.5 degrees centigrade, a roaring furnace of life. The boy - Sam - twitched slightly and murmured a name - Dean. Ws he looking for Dean? Whoever Dean was, he was not here. Such a mystery was in its way frustrating. Edward backed away, his hunger melting into a bizarre sense of concern and crouching down silently he waited for dawn. It was time he introduced himself.

------------------------------------


	2. Chapter 2

-1Days and Nights in the Forest.

_By Patroclus76_

_----------------------------_

Part two:

Edward waited and listened as the world shifted into the light. He could sense these things, naturally: the curling Earth turning its face sunwards, and sometimes, if he was very still, he could feel the universe itself shifting beneath his feet in a slow swirling, infinite embrace. It gave him a sense of vertigo deep in his stomach and made him feel rooted into the meaning of things, whatever his difference. Dawn and dusk were Edward's favourite times, a subliminal space wherein briefly two worlds lay side by side, hinged together for one sacred moment until burst asunder. His world, of darkness, of secrets and mystery, the ancient cold sorrow and anger of his people, and the world of the humans, new, brash, facile in its way, but energetic and hot, running forward with its arms out stretched like a child. In those brief twilit moments, he felt that he could cross from one into the other. The illusion amused him. He looked carefully at Sam.

As the mist had thickened in the trees and along the ground, the young man had curled up on his side, his knees into his stomach, foetal, conserving his heat. Edward watched, almost jealous of his release. He recalled watching Bella like this, moved to tears by her remarkable vulnerability. Where did humans go when they slept, Edward thought, too old to remember, and so long without sleep that it was an abstract question. He wondered for a moment if they communed in some shared dimension, or whether they broke the transient veil of their brief lives to see what; God, the end of time, the undiscovered country of their birth? _In my end is my beginning_. Bless T. S. Eliot, Edward thought, who thought the line exactly right for his mood. He smiled a soft ironic smile and almost closed his eyes. His field of vision was brushed with his thick eyelashes and for no real reason he stopped breathing completely so his face and exposed neck frosted even whiter. Part of him wanted Sam to wake up, impatient to talk to him, another simply wanted to go on watching him: the idea of killing the youth was now so remote and absurd that it seemed to belong to someone else. I am a monster with a conscience, thought Edward in dark humour, the very worst kind of compromise. And as he thought this he realised that his fantasy of killing Sam was just a desire to provoke Sam into killing him. He seemd strong enough, although he might have to be persuaded.

Just after dawn, in the chill white light that filled the forest before the sun cleared the mountains, Sam finally woke. He had been dreaming of Dean, and for a moment the fact that Dean was dead and that he was alone in the world was un-remembered, a pain waiting to stab his heart as soon as he was fully conscious. It had been like this since Dean had been clawed away into Hell. And when Sam remembered, the intensity of the sorrow winded him, as if he had been struck in the face or kicked. No matter how hard he tried he cried each morning in deep hopeless misery, misery that he lived on, cursed to wander without his brother but with his head full of Deans death. It _is _a curse, he thought, I can't even remember the good times, Dean's laugh, his absurd optimism, just his death. Sam lay on his side sobbing, his hands on his face like a child who is ashamed of crying. He could smell the deep scent of the ground and the leaves, sweet and musky. It gave him some little comfort, enough to face the absurdity of getting up and resuming his journey.

As he lifted his head he saw quite clearly a young man squatting on his haunches looking at him in quiet, almost studious contemplation. The face was beautiful but deathly white, sharp and boned, with a great mass of dark red hair. Under the half closed eyelids Sam saw the glow of deep golden amber, predatory and calm. It was not a human face at all, although the boy appeared to be younger than Sam and quite thin, dressed in a coat and canvas jeans. Almost casually Sam knew he was being scrutinised by a Vampire. Instinctively he scrambled onto his back, his arms parallel to the ground, lifting his torso up, and pushing backward until he locked his head and shoulders against the tree trunk. There was something vaguely absurd about the movement and the Vampire smiled as if he saw the joke, the sheer pointlessness of it all.

`Good morning.' it said affably and with a slight trace of an accent. Sam blinked, his mind whirling through various scenarios, none of them good. He had no sword or knife on him. The light was growing all the time but still poor. The Vampire, evidently the creature that had been tracking him for some time now, most certainly knew the terrain and was probably not alone. This would probably not end well. Sam swallowed hard but felt curiously relieved, as if he saw suddenly a route to his own death and the purpose of his journey. His own cowardice had prevented suicide, what better way to feed himself to a Vampire?

`Good morning. Your name is Sam, yes?' The Vampire spoke carefully, each word carefully nuanced as if it suspected that Sam might not speak English or understand it very well.

`Yes - Sam Winchester - how did you know that?'

`I can read your mind. _Well._' The Vampire frowned, eager to offer some qualification. `I can read some of it. It is unusually inaccessible, for a human.'

`Oh. Sorry.' Sam was still arching his stomach up, coiled like a spring, his brown-green eyes wide and fixed on Edward.

`My name is Edward. Edward Cullin. I am a stranger to these parts, as indeed are you I believe?'

Sam didn't answer. He was beginning to consider the possibility that he was hallucinating or still asleep. The vampire had been squatting by his side for some time, probably most of the night and yet he was alive and unbitten. It had probably also watched him weeping. If it had wanted him dead he would not be lying on his back looking up at it, but probably in bits or in its stomach.

`Quite.' said Edward softy, listening to Sam's inner monologue. `But I am a vegetarian, Sam. In the sense that I only eat animals. You are perfectly safe.'

Sam frowned and finally, carefully, brought his knees up and stood gingerly, his long hands out and palm up in a gesture of peace. Edward stood up as well. It felt oddly ceremonial, as if they had signed a treaty.

`Really?' said Sam softly. `Thank god for that. I've met your kind before.'

`Vampires?'

`Well vegetarians. Vampires who have renounced murder.'

Edward pulled a face, a sort of scowl, the sort of face he used to pull when Bella inexplicably fell over or walked into a wall. It was the closest expression he had to being baffled or just annoyed.

`I don't think I have ever met your _kind _before, Sam. What is your tribe?'

The word made Sam laugh, a beautiful bark, like a fox.

`Tribe?'

Edward smiled broadly, showing a row of polished ice white teeth. `Well. I thought you might be one of the indigenous ones, although your scent is too modern and strong. You move in a very - how shall I say - un-modern way! Skilful and with care. What are you doing here? Hunting?'

The word was ambiguous. Sam wondered whether Edward had worked out his identity and was testing him, or whether the word was just generic, a reasonable explanation as to why he was out in the wilderness.

`I don't hunt. I have no weapons. I just needed a break, you know. To get away. ' Sam's voice trailed away. He lowered his head, and a curtail of brown hair fell over his forehead.

`Yes, I do know Sam.'

Edward stood scrutinising the man and sensed, as he had earlier, the enormity of Sam's loss. Although in such close proximity he could now read some of the boy's thoughts they were oddly compressed and minimalist, as if Sam was deliberately not thinking at all. And when he did think, the depth of his pain oddly and profoundly mirrored Edwards, almost exactly, in shade and color. For his part, sensitive as Sam was, he thought Edward looked sad and as lost as he was.

`And you, Edward. What are you doing here? If this is not your home, and if you're not hunting me?' The boy smiled secretively, almost flirtatiously.

They had started to walk away into the trees. Low early morning sunlight angled through the high canopy and gave the forest the feel and chill of a cathedral. Edward walked next to the man, looking up at him as he watched and thought through his answer. In his old wisdom, Edward was profoundly intuitive. And despite his profound estrangement from Sam's humanity the young man touched his vanity.

`I am looking for a way to die, Sam.' he said cryptically.

Sam stopped and looked at Edward in surprise. Edward arched an eyebrow up in mock irony, and smiled at Sam's expression. It was both bemused and guarded, exquisite.

`Why?

`Because I have lost the only soul I loved and am simply not prepared to live alone.' replied Edward in his strange, clipped accent, his eyes narrowed and his face beautifully profiled.

Sam's eyes glinted with a sort of anger. `You're mocking me!' Had Edward seen his own death-wish? Was this a game?

Edward shook his head carefully. `I would never mock another man's grief, Sam: not one as keenly felt as yours. Perhaps we have not met by coincidence, perhaps our grief has drawn us together.'

`Like some dark serendipity?'

Edward laughed now, `Exactly. We are both here oddly for the same reason, Sam. We are both tired, but I have no hope of sleep.'

`I'm sorry to hear that.' said Sam softly and in way that touched Edward deeply. `I lost my brother to a demon: he made a pact in order that I might live, and the pact came due. I offered to die in his stead, but he refused and went where I could not follow.'

`I see.' said Edward softly. This must be Dean. `I fell in love with a human girl who I can only protect if I leave her behind, an act she does not understand and will barely forgive, and a decision I cannot live with.'

Sam touched Edward's arm. `A fine pairing we are. Would it be that I could kill you and then you me!'

`That would be difficult.' said Edward, enjoying himself for the first time in many months. Clearly they had both thought the same thing.

They walked on in silence, both in their own thoughts, Edward with his clever remote smile and Sam clenching his jaw.

`We should travel together for a while?' suggested Sam almost bashfully, reading Edward's thoughts unintentionally.

`Yes. I think we should. You intrigue me, Sam Winchester.'

`Yeah?' Sam smiled and for a moment, a flickering second, he forgot about Dean and the emptiness in his own soul and saw the golden even light of morning. He walked with Edward out into the broadening day, his stomach knotted in hunger.

----------------------


	3. Chapter 3

Days and Nights in the Forest.

Part Three.

(I feel I lied about only three parts…….sorry)

------------------

Sam and the Vampire walked on for several miles in deep, even silence. There was so much to talk about that for the moment neither felt able to start and so held back, each to their own, enjoying the curious intimacy of their meeting. The forest, thickening with altitude, closed in around them in great stands of pine corridored to infinity on all sides, so much so that they both felt that they were lost in some vast building without a map or a purpose. As the sun rose, strange fronds of steam and fume curled around their feet and the air became thick and fetid. Sam removed his shirt and tied it around his waist, above a pant band that showed white between his flat runed stomach and the belt of his jeans. As he did so he sensed Edward observing him carefully and wondered if he was being tactless or somehow impolite.

`Is this alright? I mean -' Sam stammered, looking sideways. He gestured over his body apologetically and then batted away a haze of flies that had gathered over his head like a halo. Edward had warmed up enough in his glacial chill to remove his coat, but looked as white and composed as at their first meeting.

`Is what alright, Sam?'

`I mean - taking my shirt off - in front of you?' Sam sounded awkward and unsure.

Edward mused gently at the question, the tone in which it had been asked. There was something in Sam's young mans diffidence that appealed to the Vampire's sense of nobility and his deep interest in who Sam was.

`It's perfectly fine, Sam. As I said before, you are quite safe with me.'

Sam nodded emphatically and smiled a short epigrammic smile. He lifted his hand absent mindedly as if he was going to touch Edward again but then seemed to think better of it. It struck Edward as an oddly feminine gesture, but set in the context of the youth's taut masculinity, the gesture was also subversive. How very odd he is, mused Edward, and how very vulnerable. Edward was not, for complex reasons, particularly tactile and he avoided touching humans if at all possible. Yet he was vaguely distressed to feel an urge to reciprocate Sam's tactility. _What is wrong with me today_, he thought. Edward drew slightly ahead of Sam so he did not have to look at his back and the deep groove of spine curved downwards, like a longbow.

Eventually Sam confessed he needed to eat, a fact he revealed as if it was a source of embarrassment or a weakness. They had been climbing steadily all morning as the woods lifting up into the skirts of the mountains, and finally even Edward sensed the heat, thick and laconic in the heavy light. Eventually, just past noon they stopped next to a cold fast flowing stream, its water freckled gold and black as it rilled over peat and boulder. They took it in turns to drink, over courteous as to who would go first, as if they were representatives of two different cultures prone to misunderstanding and acts of random violence - which in a sense they were. Edward cupped up water in his white, elegant hand and drank it in silence, while Sam leaned down on all fours and extended his head over the water, like a cougar. He submerged his whole face into the brittle cold noisily. Edward laughed.

`How very _you_!' he said to Sam as if he had known him all his life. As he said this he glanced at Sam's shoulders and their broad quilt of muscle. He thought of Blake's _Tiger_, luminous and heraldic in the night but thought Sam too gentle somehow, despite his strength.

Sam raised his eyebrows, accepting what he took rightly to be a complement, exaggerating the gesture and lapping the water in mockery. Edward shook his head as if in a mild rebuke, but the gesture was insincere and somehow Sam knew it. Edward wondered why the young man made him so fanciful, so suddenly free of his pain, and Sam wondered why in god's mystery they had not met sooner. His thirst quenched, Sam lifted his neck up. The wet had polished his face and then ran in silver beads down his chin. Shaking himself, he climbed over the stream and squatted down next to Edward.

`When did you last eat?' Sam asked, rummaging through the shoulder bag and to the Vampire's surprise, removing a small stash of nuts and dried berries wrapped in leaves.

`Some weeks ago. _Venison_. ' Edward smiled tightly. `Just the blood, you understand.'

Sam looked up into the golden, ironic eyes. They struck him as simply beautiful, the eyes of something incredible old and wise. `Yeah? I've stopped killing things for the moment. '

Edward frowned. `Because of Dean?'

`Yes, because of the way he died. There was so _much_ blood, Edward. I can't stand to take any life for the time being - the sight and smell of blood makes me sick at the moment, no offence to you, I mean -'

They were sitting shoulder to shoulder looking out into the trees as if they were waiting for something, a bus, death on horseback, a way out.

`None taken, Sam. Sam just _relax_.' Unable any more to resist, Edward ran a hand lightly over Sam's broad upper back as if he was an exotic pet. It's chill touch made Sam jump suddenly and they both laughed, although when Sam turned away Edward quickly put his hand to his face to smell Sam quickly, secretively. Edward then thought of Bella and the death of James, the swirl of violence soaked in red and the smell of iron. Human blood tasted like rust, the bitter sharp taste of oxidation. Edward sometimes found it nauseous too, like an over rich meal consumed in a frenzy. And part of him was ashamed, always ashamed, when he hunted and sank his face into the warmth of his kill.

`It must have been horrible for you, Sam. But I am frankly surprised you can sustain yourselves, given your size, merely on _these_?' He looked censoriously at the food in Sam's hand. Sam looked down, frowned and then pursed his lips in agreement. When he glanced up, the Vampire looked into the boy's eyes and found their color hard to discern, brown-green, grey, a movable feast as if they took on the shades of the forest, the dappled light through leaves.

`This evening I shall hunt for you.'

`That's very kind of you, Edward, but really -'

`I insist. I don't think you've eaten properly for many days. I'll kill a deer and drain it white, entirely bloodless. I'll even skin it for you!' The vampire sounded oddly insistent, protective. `Unless of course you plan to starve yourself?'

In uncanny synchronicity, Edward and Sam both turned to look at each other. Again Sam flashed a gentle fleeting smile of shy sorrow, while Edward found it hard not to laugh again. He shook his head gently and looked down at his own feet almost as if he was embarrassed. He was trying to work out why the proximity of the youth thrilled him. Meanwhile Sam rested his chin on the top of his own knees.

`I had thought about that actually. I'd thought about lying out under the stars and dying of exposure or something - but it seemed so passive - and I'd probably get found! I think if you're going to take your own life it should be a dramatic, powerful gesture!'

Edward agreed. He had been thinking through some extraordinarily dramatic gestures recently. As if reading his thoughts, Sam suddenly touched his arm.

`And you? How had you -'

`With great difficulty!' smiled Edward. `It is harder to break my life than yours, Sam. The only sure way would be to be killed by other Vampires, but we are a rare breed and I still need to ensure that Bella is safe. And picking a fight might start a feud that would impact on my family. It is not a question of merely cutting off my head, but of shredding and burning the body. It is unlikely I could do that all by myself!'

Sam nodded attentively, and looked at the ground as if he appreciated the difficulty. He was feeling sleepy and contemplative. For his part he had tried to cut his wrists but failed, then he had tried to shoot himself and on failing that had tried to get someone else to do it. They had refused. Suddenly Sam asked Edward to tell him more about Bella. Edward baulked at first.

`It's a rather long tale, Sam'

`Come on, tell me. Come on, _`let us sit upon the grass and tell me the sad story of the death of kings_?'

Edward narrowed his eyes playfully, unused to be toyed with, at least by a boy, but started nonetheless and then. with surprising ease, heard himself telling Sam everything like a bard narrates some epic tragedy long ago. It really was as if he and Bella were already an ancient saga worn down in the telling, a legend. Sam curled up on his side, long and sleek, an elbow to the ground, a hand on his cheek and listened intently in the speckling shade. Edward's voice mesmerised him, as did the sculptured face and the odd, mysterious accent. The whiteness of his skin was so different to his, that Sam wondered what they would look like side by side. Occasionally Edward would pause and glance at Sam's face with it's changeable, equivocal eyes and Sam would either growl `_Go on'_ or touch his arm, a gentle prod to continue. When Edward had finished the sun was slipping westward, he had told Sam of Bella's request to be turned to immortality and his refusal, and they were both in tears.

They said nothing for quite a while.

`You cry beautifully, Sam.' said Edward without sarcasm.

Sam sniffed a smile. `You think? Dean found it irritating. He thought I was too touchy feely - he was probably right. He was very macho, it helped him hide his self loathing and his anger.' Sam sighed. `And he hated being hugged!'

Edward smiled slowly, his eyes wide and attentive. `Will you tell me about your brother?'

Sam made an exquisite expression, hesitant, afraid. `It's getting late, Edward, perhaps -'

`I would like to hear, Sam. You paid me the priceless complement of empathy. Let me return the gift. We have all the days and nights in the forest we need before we decide our end.'

`Ok. Sure.' Sam sat up, brushing the soil and leaves from his body. He was thinking that unlike Edward, he burned in the moment, the brief flare of mortality and then darkness, like Dean. And that even in the moment of his illumination he was sentient of the coming dark and the horrors it contained. Edward knew nothing of this - his life was a vast even light of certainty in which the span of human lives winked in an out like ask and tinder. To love Bella was to love a moment that for Edward would be gone in an instant, leaving him empty and eternal. Sam sensed that Bella knew this, and so had Edward, but he had still refused. It was one of the things that had touched him most as Edward spoke of his love for Bella.

They re-arranged themselves, Edward stretching, his shoulder against a tree. Sam turned and in a sudden gesture as surprising as it was natural, leaned back and put his head onto Edward's lap. Sam sensed Edward's shock, but the Vampire quickly mastered it and found within a few minutes he was idly stroking Sam's head.


	4. Chapter 4

-1

Days and Nights in the Forest.

Patroclus76.

(Part Four).

-------------------------------------

And so Sam told Edward the story of his brother Dean. At least that had been his intention. Yet soothed by the long cold fingers that brushed through his hair, and comforted in his suffering by the infinite green silence of the forest, Sam opened up under the Vampire's touch and told Edward almost everything there was to tell about his strong young life: about the death of his mother, the arguments with his father, his estrangement from his own kind. He narrated the death of his girlfriend, pinned helplessly to a ceiling, snuffed out like an insect, and then he spoke of his visionary fears and his destiny. But most of all - and almost incidentally - he told Edward of his love for Dean and how Dean had protected him to the very end with his own hot, mercurial life.

`We were part of the same thing, you know?' whispered Sam, glancing up to where he guessed Edward was looking down at him. `Towards the end I never knew for sure where I ended and Dean began.' Sam twisted himself around so that he was looking up into the high vaulted ceiling of the forest and the smooth angelic face of the Vampire. `And without him I am nothing. I have no where to start or finish and no place to go. What I am is incomplete, broken.'

It was getting late. The light shafted down around them now, low angled, gathering through the gloom like pools of golden water. Edward did not want Sam to see him crying so much, so soundlessly and with such agony so he didn't answer the man. But Sam, sensitive to such things sensed Edward's despair and feared he had touched some deep agony in his friend and hesitated to continue. He went to lean forward but a broad, cold hand gently pressed him back down into the Vampire's lap.

`Please, Sam - go on. I am fine, really.' and Edward sighed deeply as if he had seen the world blown out like a candle. His kept his hand on Sam, resting on the firm warm curve of the boys breast; the thumb on the sternum, the long marbled fingers cupping the ridge of muscle that rounded away towards Sam's neck and shoulder. The texture of the boy's skin was astounding, hard and soft, so firm and yet so yielding. Sam's scent was a rich deep alkaline musk, sharp like burned leaves and soil. It was simply intoxicating. Sam momentarily closed his eyes and furtively the Vampire glanced over the long body laid out beneath him, at the dark chocolate colored nipples; the intricate lattice of abdominals plated down towards the narrow waist like strips of armour. The boy's naval was a dark smooth eye winking out from an olive, toned stomach. Edward had never seen anything so beguiling and erotic.

He frowned and shook his head in disbelief. `He is altogether beautiful.' thought the Vampire. He watched on as Sam dosed, unable to take his eyes away. Through his deep, slow breathing, Edward caught sight of the paler skin beneath the belt buckle, and on the deep warm exhale he glimpsed the first soft down of hair running off below deep into the man's groin. `But _very_ dangerous, Far more so than I at first imagined!'

`Sam?' Edward whispered his name carefully and with deep affection.

Sam's eyes opened quickly and focused on Edward with a soft familiarity.

`Yeah?'

`You were telling me about the deal your brother made at the cross roads?'

Sam smiled dreamily.

`Oh, yes. Yes I was.' He lifted his hand and took hold of Edward's, clasping it tightly as if they were praying together. The gesture bunched up Sam's bicep and a rope of vein pulsed richly on the forearm. Then Sam suddenly released Edward and stretched out cat like, rising his arms high and exposing deep pale arm pits bossed with hair, pale and seductive, like the smooth belly of a fish. The Vampire winced. `_Please_ do not do that again - ' he thought. `Please. It isn't fair.' Sam yawned, showing a wide moist mouth white with teeth and shook himself before resuming his saga, of Dean's journey and the long quest to break the deal he had bargained for. As Sam spoke, his voice vibrated through his neck and down into Edward's own body so the Vampire both felt and heard him speaking in soft, deep growls. The story of Sam's resurrection shocked him, but suddenly much of the boys mysterious attraction seemed to make sense, for like Edward himself, Sam had died and yet been reborn.

`We have much in common, Sam.'

`I know.'

`Can I see?'

`See what?'

`Where you were stabbed?'

`Yeah, sure!' Sam leaned up and arched down as if he was going to touch his toes. Edward had noticed no scars or wounds earlier that day as he had watched the boy walking in front of him. He was curious and concerned to see where the fatal blow had fallen.

Sam's back opened out broad and strong. Between the shoulder blades knuckled vertebra pushed up through the skin and reminded Edward of the backs of whales, breaking through the blue cold ocean off Forks. Sam guided Edward's fingers to the pale gossamer thread of a scar deep on the spine itself. The skin was soft on either side, tender. Edward closed his eyes in shock at the violence and left his hand there, resisting the urge to kiss the wound. He was looking down at the nape of Sam's neck where his rich dark hair snaked and curled outwards, and then, as Sam moved, a line of cheek, angular and sharp, shaded with a soft haze of stubble.

`You see I'm cursed, Edward. I have seen only darkness and been visited by demons, And now I am alone.'

`I am not so sure.' Edward spoke softly and slowly. `You are woven deep into the fabric of this world, Sam Winchester, threaded into the pulse of some great plan and you will not be easily unstitched from it. If I had been Dean, I would have done the same, whatever the price. You are a gift, Sam. _You _should accept it.'

`Really? But a gift brought at great loss.' countered Sam, turning around and sitting up in order to look at the Vampire. Their faces were very close.

`Edward. You wish to keep Bella human because you love her as a human and do not wish to turn her into a monster. She wishes to live with you forever. Dean gave his life to save me because he could not bear the thought of my death, and yet he cursed me to live without him. Our circumstances are similar but not identical.'

Edward noticed that Sam was looking at his lips and his throat with intense curiosity, perhaps as intrigued by their whiteness as Edward was by Sam's deep sun kissed brown. The man then looked into the Vampires eyes, cautiously at first as if he was stealing up his strength and then more searchingly.

`You have a way out of your dilemma. I do not. Edward, will you kill me? If I ask you to? I mean, if I ask you very nicely?'

Despite the gravity of the request and the extraordinary distress it caused Edward, almost a physical pain deep in his heart, he laughed spontaneously and with real joy. Sam had asked the most absurd question with such touching intensity and had for a moment reminded Edward so much of Bella that he felt he was actually with her. `I am going mad at last' thought the Vampire, I see and smell Bella in the hard outlines of a man who has been touched by God and does not recognised it. Edward had started to say that he would rather kill himself than harm Sam when he stopped at the obvious contradiction. And Sam, as if he could now read Edward's thoughts, smiled seductively.

`But could you kill me at the same time?' asked Edward, and his voice was surprisingly grave.

`It depends. I think you are too beautiful and too special to seek death, Edward, and death is hard for you to find. And Bella lives? Is that not hope enough? You belong with her, and if you do not save yourself then I am sure she will - as Dean saved me. No, I couldn't kill you.'

`Then why should I live and you die? Dean's death is not categorical. Yours wasn't? You have found the route from this world into the next, and I sense you have crossed the threshold many times. It is not possible that you could go down to Hades to find Dean and swim up back into the light? There is demon blood in you, it in part explains your extraordinary scent, but there is divinity in you as well, Sam. If anyone had the audacity to make your brother live again, it is you.'

`And you have the wit to save Bella and live with her in great happiness, even if it means she must age and die or be changed forever?'

Edward pointed a finger at Sam's nose in mock anger. `Don't be clever!'

Sam snapped his teeth playfully at the extended finger. `It's part of my curse, Edward.'

The Vampire looked into the green-brown eyes and felt his cold heart yield, touched by a warmth he had not expected to find and which still made no sense. For his part, Sam looked at Edward as if he was something precious and bejewelled but infinitely remote, as if he was looking at a rare creature like a unicorn but through the wrong end of a telescope. Gently but with a certain masculine certainty Sam pushed his head forward and, placing his warm hand on Edward's neck, aligned their mouths together. Edward moved back sharply.

`What are you doing?' His voice was almost scared.

Sam looked surprised, oddly assertive and shy at the same time. `I was going to kiss you?'

`Oh.'

Sam hesitated, momentarily confused, but before he could work out his response to Edward's indecision, the Vampire threw himself at Sam and buried his mouth onto the young man's lips and eagerly allowed Sam to curl his tongue into his cheek. Edward's cold body radiated chill into Sam, while Sam branded his heat into Edward and both, after a long and deep kiss, surfaced gasping and trembling for air.


	5. Chapter 5

_Days and Nights in the Forest._

Concluding Part.

Patroclus76.

Warning: I do not think this is explicit but it might offend. It is not my intention and should be read in the spirit of the story as a whole.

-------------

The two young men sat staring at each other, their bodies taut and trembling. Both were deeply shocked by the kiss and for a moment unhooked from the world in which they had hitherto lived their separate, different lives. They panted for breath as if they had been chased and corned. No one spoke. The soft evening twilight darkened under the trees like a slow rising tide, running in as the sun dipped below the horizon, and softly obliterating the outlines of tree and leaf. Still neither moved, as if they had fallen under a deep and powerful enchantment and feared to break it. Sam had tasted the infinite chill of a long winter touched at last by the promise of spring, and in his lust had seen himself for the first time, radiant and ablaze, but also Edward: as if the disguise of the cold white body had been stripped away and the true, unendurable beauty of the Vampire revealed at last. For his part, Edward had tasted in Sam his own lost mortality, the echo of something he had once been, and in a moment of ecstasy had glimpsed the vast promise of life with Bella. If was as if Sam _was _Bella in disguise, wrought in muscle and fibre into a dazzling masculine beauty that mirrored his own and shook his death wish and his hopeless certainty. The sensation of kissing Sam was impossible to describe. And yet for both Sam and Edward, in that moment of astounding grace had come a premonition of parting, the pulsing quick silver of a world in which nothing lasted and all perished; even Edward sensed it, the end of all things.

`Sam.'

Edward's voice was a whisper. He raised his hand and with a long elegant finger he traced out the line of the boy's firm lips.

`Edward?'

Sam took Edward's hand and kissed it, kissing the cold wrist and the arm, peeling back the sleeve of his shirt to lick the forearm. Edward half stood, moving back, the sensation so sensuous as to be almost unendurable. He thought to himself simply `Sam is trying to arouse me beyond reason, he wants me to lose control and kill him.'

`You are a devil, Sam Winchester. You are tempting me with your own flesh, knowing I will be unable to resist, knowing I have watched you these past weeks -'

`I am not temping you at all -' Sam suddenly swung his head back up into Edward's and with his teeth bit Edward's lip affectionately and with cool precision. Caught off balance, the Vampire fell forward into the astounding heat of the young man, the staggering heady scent, and before he could protest or resist he tasted the hot iron tang of Sam's blood in his mouth.

`I'll _kill_ you -' Edward pleaded. The world was suddenly luminous to him, the dark lines of the forest drawn in great florescent lines of neon. Sam saw the golden irises of Edward's eyes grow blue-black and bestial, but he continued to calmly licked the white face, and with a hand to Edward's neck, moved the Vampire's mouth away from his, down the carved, brown neck, past his throat, across the broad duned shoulder, then down across his breast; smearing a comet trail of blood from his chin to his nipple. Edward felt he was going to explode in wrath, a fury of teeth and nails and yet suddenly he sensed his hatred and lust evaporate, burned away, as if for a brief moment Sam had made him human again.

`You won't kill me.' whispered Sam and with his free hand he started to unbuckle his belt, to snap and open the buttons on his jeans, and to pull down his pant band from the solid wall of his lower stomach. They fell away with studied ease.

Edward felt a lust close to panic, something so delirious that for a moment he thought he might be sick or faint or scream.

`Sam - what are you doing? What do you want?' Edward lifted his face away from Sam's chest and then, unable to control himself, licked up into Sam's arm pit. Sam laughed gently, furtively, and raised his arm obligingly. Although he could not see in the dark, Edward already knew the exact expression on the man's face, the lines on the cheeks, the frown etched into the forehead and around the eyes. Edward felt the solid wedge of triceps on his lips and the warm salty fug of Sam's smell. He tasted like peat and smoke, bitter. Sam took Edward's hand and guided it down towards his groin.

`You know what I want. I want you to let me deep inside you. Will you?'

Edward nodded his head slowly in reluctant, joyous agreement. For the first time in his long life he felt cold, and unable to resist the astounding power of who Sam was, he started to unbutton his shirt, to tear if off, in sudden desperation, in fear that the moment would pass and never come again. When he had finished Sam was already naked, his hand sweeping Edward's thigh.

--------------

Sam awoke as the darkness was lifting. In the soft greyness he heard the solitary, monastic beads of song from thrush and blackbird, and realised he was curled up over Edward's back, his arms joined around the Vampire's tight narrow waist and his mouth nestled into the base of Edward's deep red hair. They were naked but partly covered by Edward's coat and their shirts, that somehow someone had knotted together like the sail of a small boat. Sam's body was sore and cold. He lifted his head away and looked down to see his legs and stomach traced with papery white trails of dried semen. His nipples and neck were tender and his balls ached with a dull muscular throb. He wondered for a brief moment if Edward was in fact asleep but realised the impossibility of it and gently chewed his ear.

`You are awake, naturally?'

He heard Edward snort and saw in his minds eye the elegant, ironic smile that Edward wore when he was amused and touched at the same time.

`Of course. Although I have to confess that for a _moment_, sometime when you were murmuring to yourself about tort law, I felt I had actually drifted off and slept, but only for a second!'

`Really?' whispered Sam, smiling as well. He tightened his grip on Edward and snuggled down. Then despite himself Sam started to laugh.

`What?'

`Nothing. The idea of trying to warm myself against you is - well - sort of funny!'

Edward closed his eyes and pushed his buttocks back into Sam's groin and Sam laughed again, louder this time, and the sound of his joy vibrated into Edward through the corded brown arms that lay tight around him. Edward was exhausted still, his body bruised and cut. They had made love in the darkness, falling over things, laughing and shrieking, Sam's body everywhere, a rugged landscape demanding and yet careful, gentle, aggressive and then yielding. Had it been a dream? Was he dreaming now? Why did it have to end?

They lay together until the sun warmed the forest and the deep green light yellowed towards mid morning. They then arose and drank in the stream, made breathless by the deep cold water. They then washed in front of each other, unabashed and then dressed carefully as if they were both on official business. Afterwads they walked for a while, hand in hand until they came suddenly to a road that neither had expected to find. It was the first sign of human habitation they had come across for many weeks. Sam thought it ominous.

`You'll leave today, won't you?' he asked, looking at the road as if it was a trick or a mystery, left for him and for him alone, evidence of their parting.

`Yes. But you have changed what I am.' said Edward simply `And what I want to be.'

Sam looked at him and smiled his most enchanting smile, the one that Edward thought of for long years after when ever he was distressed or bewildered.

`Will I see you again?' asked Sam, looking at the Vampire now directly.

`I am not sure, Sam. I am not sure it would be a good idea. You bring me close to madness. Next time I might really kill you!'-

`Ok. I understand. And I don't want to die now, I want to find Dean and restore what is mine, or rather what can be restored.' Sam's sadness was the most beautiful thing Edward had ever seen. They parted just after noon, kissing each other primly but both in tears. Sam thought that Edward had been sent to him out of his own misery to take him back into the light, while Edward thought Sam was the nearest thing to God a Vampire could reasonably expect to find. For weeks afterwards, until Sam returned to the world of men, he would find the odd deer drained of blood left for him to eat as if for all is masculine assertion, Edward watched over him and not vice versa.

-------------

They did meet once again, strange as it may seem. As Sam's long life came to its natural end, his old and withered body lay in a bed in an old house not far from Seattle. His wife and family, and their families also, had gathered quietly and contemplatively, talking and reading with the old man until one evening, sensing the end was near, Sam had asked them to leave him so that he could make his peace with God and prepare like the ancient Seraphs of old, to come into the divine presence. As he prayed he suddenly saw a young pale man sitting on the end of his bed by the open window, smiling a clever but affectionate smile. He recognised his friend immediately and they embraced deeply. They then spoke of their lives, of their successes, and how they had both lived to achieve their ambitions. Afterwards they were together in silence, Edward holding the old man's hand to his mouth and playfully blowing on his fingers.

`Edward, my body is broken. I am ashamed for you to see me like this, an old and ruined thing. When I saw you last I was young and my world was yet in it's making - thanks to you.'

Edward tutted.

`Your scent is the same, Sam. And would you believe that beyond this body I can still see the dark, young man swimming in a pool, the shocking raw beauty of you! You think that this is you?' he touched Sam's weathered, lined face. `This is a mask, Sam. When we met that day long ago I thought you were the most beautiful thing I ever saw and I think that now, Bella not withstanding!'

They both laughed and then Edward said gently. `Where is the soul, Sam, in what part of us does it reside, and wherein lies the beat of its heart and the promise?'

`I don't know.' whispered the old man. `Long have I looked for it.'

Edward laughed and said. `You do know. I didn't know until you told me - how can you have forgotten? Come on, take my hand, I'll take you to it.'

And Sam felt the cold long fingers lace through his and suddenly found himself rushing through the great vast greens of trees and mountains, one great kaleidoscope of days and nights in the forest, as if his life had never ended. Sam's great grand-daughter found him later, eyes wide and smiling, dead but with his face turned to the opened window. Earlier she had come up to his room because she had heard voices and laughter, and in her haste to climb to the top of the wild old house, she had paused for breath at the rill of a wide deep window and spied two boys running out, hand in hand, yawping into the trees.


End file.
